[andrewas]

CD-R people, its the only economic way to avoid this. As a side note -I Refuse to spend 40 quid an hours for those bastards at PC-WOrld to break my computer, rather do it myself. Ive even broken the Warranty seals on my CD-ROM drive so thered be no point in getting someone else in.

As to why they did it its standard practice to erase the hard-drive when theres a software problem, on the basis that its simpler to get people to get to a known starting point (blank) and install the OS (Which you could do yourself) than it is to get people to fix the problem.